Hampton Sides' rendering of Kit Carson in 'Blood and Thunder' is history at its best

Reviewed by Craig SeligmanDecember 24, 2006

For most of us, the name Kit Carson just evokes some old movies and TV shows. A few people may know they were the progeny of some 70 pulp novels, called “blood and thunders” in the 19th century, in which he was the Indian-fighting hero.

With graceful irony, Hampton Sides – an editor at large at Outside magazine and author of the 2001 “Ghost Soldiers” – has made “Blood and Thunder” the title of his thrilling history of the conquest of the American West.

BOOK REVIEW

Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West
Hampton Sides; Doubleday, 460 pages, $26.95

It's a big, intricate narrative, tied together by one character, an illiterate Missourian whom the young William Tecumseh Sherman described as “a small, stoop-shouldered man, with freckled face, soft blue eyes and nothing to indicate extraordinary courage or daring”: the historical Kit Carson.

Among his many talents (his greatest, it seems, was for tracking), Carson had a Zelig-like knack for showing up where history was being made. He was the scout who assured the success of John C. Fremont's exploratory expeditions in the 1840s. He became a vital player in President James K. Polk's Mexican War, the rapacious land grab in which the U.S. acquired the Western third of the continent.

His bravery and good sense as a military commander cemented the success of Union forces in the West during the Civil War. In his final and most controversial triumph, he subjugated the Navajos in the Indian Wars of the 1860s.

“Carson never used the term 'scorched earth,' ” Sides writes, but the Indian Wars marked “the first systematic use of it in the West – and more than a year before Sherman's march across the South.” Though today the Navajos view Carson the way Georgians think of Sherman, Sides presents him as a figure of Lincolnesque rectitude.

“Carson's integrity was simply perfect,” Sherman observed, and he added, “The Indians knew it.” After decades spent quietly accomplishing miracles in the service of his country, Carson died, in 1868, one of its greatest celebrities, and probably its poorest: It never occurred to him to cash in on his fame.

The Indian Wars take up the final third of “Blood and Thunder,” and the author negotiates this morally crabbed terrain with amazing deftness. He doesn't use the word “genocide,” as others have, and though he doesn't flinch from describing the army's appalling cruelties (burning, for example, nearly 2 million pounds of food the Navajos desperately needed for the coming winter), he also shows why the campaign was inevitable and even – once you accept the notion of white settlement at all – necessary.

The Navajos, wrote Brigadier General James Henry Carleton, the fanatical commander who sent Carson out on his missions of devastation and whose dictatorial reign eventually made him hated by New Mexicans and American Indians alike, “can no more be trusted than you can trust the wolves that run through their mountains.”

He wasn't wrong. The Indians lived by such a different code that there was no way for them and the settlers to reach an understanding. Raiding was an all but inexpugnable part of their culture; their vast flocks of sheep were largely stolen, and they so regularly murdered male settlers and kidnapped women and children that as late as 1849 there were, as one observer wrote at the time, “but few so bold as to travel alone 10 miles from Santa Fe.”

The Indians were disastrously slow to comprehend that their alternatives were life on the white man's terms or doom. Carson was no Indian hater, but “if permitted to remain as they are,” he predicted, “before many years they will be utterly extinct.” That was why he could carry out his ugly war with total conviction.

Sides' book reminds us that the United States is built on a history that its citizens can't always be proud of. But without that history, the country as we know it wouldn't exist. He doesn't shy from this complexity.